Tag Archives: Americans Paying Taxes

In the contemporary era, debates about who deserves to be American are still couched in the rhetoric of who pays taxes. Immigration reformers have campaigned under the slogan ”Viva Taxes!” to highlight the eagerness of unauthorised immigrants to pay their share, and, by implication, their worthiness for legal residency. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton both discussed the status of immigrants in terms of taxes. ”Our undocumented workers in New York pay more in taxes than some of the biggest corporations,” said Clinton, arguing for a path to citizenship for these immigrants. A few months later, Donald Trump justified the cost of mass deportation of more than eleven million undocumented residents, along with other draconian immigration policies, by saying that these immigrants ”are here illegally. They are not paying taxes.” Throughout American history, taxpaying has been a symbolic battlefield on which political elites have fought to define the limits of citizenship.

Hmm, well who’d have thought it? The American psyche that is, unduly answerable to some sort of societal conscience? That Donald Trump of course, hasn’t declared any tax returns whatsoever in recent years – which he has openly admitted, makes him ”smart” – is of course, a colossal irony.

If not somewhat beside the point.

That said, Read My Lips – Why Americans Are Proud To Pay Taxes, really isn’t beside the point. It is the point; not to mention an altogether enlightening read which may well go some way in deciphering just what it is that essentially makes America, the country as well as its ideology, fundamentally tick. Regardless of the appalling American Dream and the rancid trajectory of nigh everything it ultimately entails.

That said, where Vanessa S. Williamson’s book really holds sway and stands its tax induced ground, is in the perhaps robustly wayward assumption that ”Americans see being a taxpayer, as a role worthy of pride and respect, a sign that one is a contributing member of the community and the nation.”

Having lived in the States, I’d have to say that to a certain degree, this actually might be true.

The paying of taxes does, for whatever bizarre/bonkers reason, inoculate the average American with self-induced feelings of Carte Blanche righteousness and superiority. An avenue of thought, subliminally noted by the author of Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict, Heather Boushey, when she writes: For a long time, many concluded that Americans find taxes revolting, but Williamson, employing quantitative and qualitative analysis, comes to the opposite conclusion. By asking long-unexplored questions about why we pay taxes and what we believe taxes should pay for, she reveals that Americans see paying taxes as an ethical act and one’s civic duty. Taxation with representation is at the core of what it means to be American.”

Quite oft, this is indeed all to annoyingly evident. Likewise the notion that Americans actually enjoy doing so, which, if truth be silently told, is utter hogwash. Bollocks in fact.

Like most people, Americans abhor paying taxes, because – and here’s the (real) deal – it reeks of socialism; which in the US at least, is deemed worse than paedophilia and murder, homosexuality and communism combined.

So while Read My Lips might invariably make for ambiguous, occasionally entertaining and diversionary reading, it cannot, in all honesty, be taken at all seriously.